


It's an Ineffable Life

by soft_october



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - It's a Wonderful Life Fusion, Christmas Eve, First Meetings, Fluff and Humor, Light Angst, M/M, Pre-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2019-12-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:34:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21919954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soft_october/pseuds/soft_october
Summary: I mean what did Aziraphale expect?To lie straight to God's face and not be reprimanded?Aziraphale has been stuck in heaven for the last six thousand years. But due to a clerical error and some good old fashioned Christmas magic, he given a chance to reclaim his status if he can do one thing: Show a demon that his life matters.Only it doesn't go as he expects.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 34
Kudos: 294





	It's an Ineffable Life

**Author's Note:**

> This is dedicated to everyone who clicked this link instead of suffering through another conversation with Uncle MAGA and Aunt Microaggression. May we all get through the holidays with our sanity intact.

It was a nice day. 

All the days had been nice. 

But then Adam and Eve left the garden, and Aziraphale (after… _creatively_ answering the Lord’s inquiries) had been left feeling rather low as he watched the couple disappear with his sword over the horizon. 

Then rather lovely demon came along, and made him feel a bit better. 

It had started to rain, and he shielded the demon from the rain with his outstretched wing. He was just about to suggest they head down the wall to find some shelter when he got sucked right up to heaven in the middle of his sentence. Just "Well, if you wouldn't mind Crawly, I'd rather like to-" and then poof, white walls, heavenly choirs, and a supervisor with a sour face. 

I mean what did Aziraphale expect? 

To lie straight to God's face and  _ not _ be reprimanded? 

In another life, perhaps. But in this one, he went straight upstairs, got plunked down in an uncomfortable chair at a desk that was to small, and placed in charge of creating an exhaustive catalogue of the most dreadful thing imaginable:  _ every _ version of  _ every _ hymn from  _ every _ religion. 

_ Celestial harmonies _ , day in, and day out, for the next  _ six thousand _ years. 

Aziraphale did  _ not  _ wonder if falling would have been a less harsh punishment (not out loud, anyway) and made a valiant effort to buck up under the weight of the most appallingly monotonous task in all of Christendom. He thought he was doing a rather passable sort of job. 

(He was not.) 

There was some chatter about replacing him, below. The paperwork was even filed at one point, then promptly lost, forgotten, and is most likely even now rotting away in a heavenly outbox on a dusty desk. No angel was assigned to earth, in the end. Too risky, they said. One angel was down there for a week and gave away his sword, talked to a demon, and  _ lied to God _ . What would a month bring, a year, a few millennia? Cavorting with humans, dining with demons? No, it was too awful to think about. Best to keep all your employees right where you can see them, keep an eye on things for six thousand years or so. 

But maybe god got a little bored. Maybe she was tired of the constant adoration. Maybe it was all just your average clerical fuck up, what the hell do I know? (I’m just the narrator, after all.) But however it happened, it happened on Christmas Eve, because of  _ course it did. _

(What else did you expect? It's a  _ Christmas story. _ )

* * *

The demon known as Crowley had been having a miserable six thousand years on Earth. 

There had been fires, and plagues, and wars, and famines, and all the nasty little things demons were supposed to be  _ absolutely chuffed _ about. Kings had murdered and been murdered, babes had wailed in the night. One afternoon Genghis Khan murdered so many people the atmosphere lost a considerable amount of carbon dioxide. For centuries, he sat back and watched as the humans devised terrible new ways to hurt each other, and he hadn't lifted a finger to do  _ any  _ of it, despite what the commendations piling up in his closet might indicate. 

Thought the whole business all a bit of a downer, really, didn't enjoy it in the least. Certainly didn't  _ like _ any of it. 

Crowley  _ liked _ nice suits, fast flashy cars, and music that made him want to drive faster. 

He did not care  _ at all _ for the gnawing sense of ennui he was always attempting to drive away from. 

The years dragged on and on, and it was fine, it was fine, (it was closer to lousy than fine) and Crowley finally had to face up to the fact that he was dreadfully lonely. He felt there should have be something, some _ one _ there beside him, and without it, there was a gnawing hole in his heart that festered away like dry rot. 

And one winter’s night, he stood at the steps of a church and he thought about what the consecrated ground would do to him, how long it would take. 

He thought about holy water. 

(He wasn’t serious, one would hope. It was a bit like when you hope to get hit by a bus crossing the street to avoid having to go to the bank later.) 

But there he stood. 

* * *

“Aziraphale.” Gabriel’s face was not welcoming. Gabriel’s face was never welcoming, not since the whole ‘losing the sword’ business. (Aziraphale was, of course, too polite to say, but it wasn’t as if his face had been all that friendly  _ before _ , either.) 

“Y-yes, Gabriel?” 

“We have an assignment for you.” 

“Ah, new hymns then?” Aziraphale gave a sort of smile he thought was rather pleasant. (If you asked Gabriel it was as excruciating as the little smile you have to give your aunt at Christmas instead of slapping her.) 

“No. This is something… different.” 

“Oh?” Aziraphale tried not to get too excited too quickly. This had happened once before and all it turned out to be was a brand new sect that edited all the good bits out of the Song of Solomon. Gabriel had been  _ delighted _ . 

“I would have you know that there is a way to reinstate your good standing with heaven.” 

“There is?” Aziraphale tried to control his voice, contain his excitement. “I’m sure I’ve never heard of one.”

(This was because Gabriel had made this up ten minutes before he summoned Aziraphale before him. Sure, he had lied to the almighty, but Aziraphale had been moping around heaven for six thousand years and everyone was a bit on edge to get him out of the office already.) 

“Yes. Er - It’s  _ quite  _ secret, you understand, wouldn’t want  _ below _ getting a hold on that kind of information.” Gabriel hunkered down secretly, and Aziraphale hunched with him. 

“Oh, No… of course not,” he mumbled. 

“Now, there’s a lot of people asking for help for a -” Gabriel glanced down at his notes hastily. “Anthony J Crowley.”

Here is where we have to believe, as we cling to the sense of Christmas magic like an overly perky heroine in a bad christmas rom-com, that there is a different sort of feeling in the air on Christmas Eve, a sort of supernatural ability to nudge rather unlikely happenings closer to the realm of possibility. 

Because had Gabriel cared to take a second glance, he would have seen that the name on the paper was not “Anthony J Crowley at all, but an Anthony J  _ Cowwley _ , who at this very moment was standing atop the railing of a bridge, contemplating the waters beneath. 

“Anthony J Crowley,” Aziraphale repeated. “R-right.” 

“Uriel will brief you on your mission.” 

(Don’t worry about Mr. Cowwley. A very nice young man is about to walk by and have a tense but ultimately successful conversation with him. They’ll go out for coffee, and two years, three months, and six days later, they’ll put bands on each other’s fingers and say I do.) 

* * *

_ Now this is the last fuckin’ thing I need,  _ Crowley thought, as the Angel of the Lord tripped into existence along a beam of light. He hadn’t seen many angels ‘round these parts (saw Sandalphon from a distance once back in Sodom, with the chilling grin of a toddler who’s just been caught pulling the wings off a dragonfly). But he had never seen one up close, not since - 

“Be afeared, Anthony J. Crowley!” the angel boomed. And then immediately after, before Crowley could even think to duck and cover from whatever smiting he supposed he earned himself at some point, “No - no that’s not right. It's be  _ not _ afeard." He looked at Crowley, as if  _ he _ was supposed to provide some sort of answer. Crowley just shrugged. "Oh, I’ve mucked it all up already, haven’t I?” 

“I’ll say,” Crowley agreed, “Going around telling demons not to be afraid of angels." 

“Oh, that’s impossible,” said the angel as he brushed invisible specks of ethereal dust from his clothes. “I’m an angel, and you,  _ human _ , are clearly not a  _ demon. _ Heaven wouldn't have sent me otherwise!" 

_ Ah _ , Crowley thought.  _ Wait, what? _

“Heaven didn't send you to smite me?" Crowley asked, and the angel shook his head. 

"Of course not! Angels don't go around smiting humans left and right." Crowley made a face. "Well… not  _ anymore  _ at least." 

"Once again,  _ demon _ ," Crowley pointed at himself. "So what's the deal then? Why all the blinding light and the 'Be afeared' or whatever it's supposed to be?" 

“Oh! Yes!” The angel got very excited, and puffed out his chest a bit. “I’m Aziraphale! I’m the answer to your prayers!” 

Crowley doubted this very much. He had hurled a great many thoughts towards god over the last six millenia. He wouldn’t dare to call any of them  _ prayers _ . Not as such. More like… epithets. Usually when she’d done a great horrible thing and there was wailing and blood in the streets. 

Either way, it was rather difficult for Crowley to believe that the answer to his prayers was in the body of this angel, this  _ Aziraphale _ , with his soft eyes and softer face and - 

_ Aziraphale!  _ A memory danced across Crowley’s mind. (Don’t blame it for taking so long. It had to travel through six thousand years of late nights drinking alone, yelling at god, and trying to avoid doing the majority of hell’s dirty work to get here.) 

_ I gave it away. _

“You gave it away,” Crowley mumbled, his eyes going wide and warm behind his glasses. 

“What was that?” Aziraphale asked. 

“Nothing,” Crowley replied. “But I think there’s been some mistake. Don’t think heaven would have sent you down to help a demon, after all.” Aziraphale sniffed the air about them, finally caught a whiff of fire and brimstone with a hint of sulfur. Perhaps this  _ wasn't _ a mortal after all. 

“Hrm,” said Aziraphale, about as taken aback as if Crowley had just told him his cocoa had gone cold. “That  _ does _ seem unusual.”

“Agreed! So you just, go your way, and I’ll go mine, and we can forget this whole thing ever happened.” Crowley shoved his hands in his pockets and made a very big show of walking away. No sense in getting involved with angels, no matter how much their hair shone in the moonlight, or the way their nose and cheeks went pink with the cold, or - 

“Wait!” called Aziraphale. “Please, just a moment!”

_ Damn _ . 

Crowley stopped. 

“You don’t seem like a bad sort,” Aziraphale said, catching him up. “And - well, this assignment is rather important…”

“And why’s that, angel?” 

“I made… a bit of a mistake, I’m afraid. A few thousand years ago. I… well, no sense in getting into the details now but… this is my chance to… get back into heaven’s graces, as it were.” 

“The sword,” Crowley said, before he could stop himself. “They punished you because of the sword.” 

“Oh, yes, that was - Now wait just a minute, demon!” Aziraphale took a step back. “How would you know a thing like that unless-” But Aziraphale stopped, and looked into Crowley’s eyes. Not the glasses, which had been on his face since Aziraphale had materialized, despite the fact that it was quite late at night and there was really no reason for them. He looked into his eyes, because Crowley had, the moment Aziraphale stepped back from him in alarm, bitten his bottom lip, slowly raised his hands to his face, and pulled the lenses away. He blinked at Aziraphale once, twice, willing him to remember, hoping that heaven hadn’t wiped his memories of earth or - or brainwashed him or something. 

“It’s  _ you _ ,” Aziraphale said, in a voice that was quite different from the one before. “The demon on the wall. Crawly?”

“It’s Crowley, now,” Crowley said. “Obviously.”

“There’s really been a terrible sort of mix-up, hasn’t there?” Aziraphale said, staring at the stonework at his feet. There seemed to be a bit of a war going on in his expression, and Crowley was rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, a coil of anxiety. 

“I could go back up there, and tell them there’s been a mistake,” Aziraphale began, after a minute. “Or…” Crowley saw a spark there, a shimmer of the angel he’d met on the wall.  _ I gave it away. _ “We could go through the whole rigamarole, and I can go back up there and tell them you’re not going to do anything… drastic, and I’ll re-earn my status?” 

“Why not angel?” Crowley replied, after about half a second of deliberation. It was as good a way to spend Christmas Eve as any, certainly better than charging headfirst into a church just to see what it would do to him. “At least I will have been good for something.” 

“What did you just say?”

“I said at least I would have been good for something.” 

“Oh!” Aziraphale seemed far too delighted by Crowley’s deprecating statement than was perhaps polite, but he was an angel after all, can’t go around expecting angel’s to be glad for the existence of demons.

“I know exactly how to help you!” Aziraphale declared. 

“Help… me?” Crowley was losing the conversation rapidly. Weren't they just going to rubber stamp the whole thing? Call it a wash? Maybe - maybe pop in at the pub before Aziraphale had to head back upstairs? 

“I bet you’re a very dasterdly sort of demon indeed! I’ll take you through all the things you’ve done, and you’ll see what a good um, foot soldier you are for the forces of hell!” 

“I really don’t think-” 

“Too late!”

Aziraphale snapped, and everything went dark. 

* * *

Crowley came to in a garden. The sun was hot on his back, but there were clouds gathering in the distance which suggested that all might not be so well in ten minutes time. 

"Where are we?" he asked the angel, who had just landed with a less than graceful thump beside him. 

"At the very beginning, I think!" Aziraphale said, practically rubbing his hands together with excitement. 

"And what, exactly, are we doing here?" 

"I'm not sure! You must have done something quite  _ evil _ here. Without you it didn't happen at all, and we'll see how that changed things!" 

"'Course I did," Crowley replied. "Original sin, and all that." 

"Oh! I wonder if - well, if you weren't there, perhaps humanity never left the garden at all!" 

But, as the angel and demon quickly discovered, Adam and Eve  _ had _ . They watched as the first couple of humans stood up on the walls of Eden and saw the wide world outside the walls of Eden, they had wondered, they had dreamed, and they had packed supplies of all the fruit in the garden, stolen a flaming sword from a sleeping angel, and fled the garden in the night. 

"I don't understand!" Aziraphale mourned, as he watched them set out across the desert. "They had paradise here!" 

Crowley, who had seen humans do all sorts of insane things, like climb mountains, or try to reach the stars, or sail out across the wide blue ocean on tree trunks with nothing but the wind and dreams and hope and packets of seeds, understood perfectly why they had left. But before he could explain this to Aziraphale, they both turned as a lone figure climbed the wall. 

It was Aziraphale. 

But not the Aziraphale next to him, who had brought them here. This was the Aziraphale from the beginning, the Aziraphale who had - 

"Suppose you won't get called upstairs this time," Crowley muttered. "You didn't fail or give away heavenly property. See angel?" Now his smile was rue and bitter. "If it wasn't for me, you could have stayed down here. I -" he looked away. "Ruined it for you. Quite the terrible deed, hrm? Isn't this better for you?" 

Aziraphale did not reply. Crowley wasn't sure if he was really listening. 

He wasn't. 

Aziraphale was watching his younger self, standing there on the wall, as Adam and Eve retreated over the horizon. He looked very small, and very, very, alone. 

"Angel? I'm saying it would have been better for you if I'd never been here. If I'd never existed." 

"Huh? Oh. Er. Right dear." Aziraphale paused, thought again about the angel on the wall. "Well then," he said, with perhaps a bit less pep than before, "shall we be off?"

* * *

“ _ Aziraphale _ ?” Crowley called. The wind was  _ howling _ and the rain blew in his face so thick he could barely open his eyes. “Angel?” He meant to miracle the rain away, but before he could - 

“There you are!” Aziraphale was descending from on high,  _ wafting _ down like he was out for a Sunday flight. His wings were outstretched, shielding Crowley from the downpour.“Sorry about the weather, I’m afraid I’m not quite in control of where we land.”

But Crowley was no longer listening, not as such. He had fixed his eyes on a group of humans, all children, clinging to each other on the roof of a barn below them, a speck in the midst of a churning sea. The water was already sloshing over the clay tiles, grabbing at their heels, and they looked up at the sky in fear. 

Aziraphale couldn’t see where his cause for concern was. Crowley was a  _ demon _ after all. Sworn to evil deeds and all that. He’d read the heavenly pamphlets on the enemy. (Gabriel had required it, after all. There had been several meetings with powerpoints and charts.) But.. Crowley wasn’t  _ acting  _ like the gleeful red little imp with horns that had been the clipart in all the briefings. He looked - 

“Are you alright, Crowley?” 

“No,” whispered Crowley, not looking at Aziraphale. “No they shouldn’t be here,  _ I _ took them, I was there-” 

“What are you talking about?” 

“Those  _ kids _ Aziraphale! Those kids that  _ your _ almighty wanted dead I - I snuck them on to the Ark, all that room for - for penguins and oxen and they couldn’t find room for twenty children? Ridiculous, completely -” Crowley was getting frantic, and Aziraphale was not much better. 

“You rescued them,” Aziraphale stuttered, barely managing to keep hold of the  _ but you’re a demon _ that crept up his throat. “That’s why we’re here, to see them… because you… You… they weren’t here because you…” Aziraphale turned towards the Ark, a dark looming smudge on the horizon. “Oh,  _ Crowley _ .” 

He hated how the angel said his name, with awe and confusion and something like...  _ admiration _ . 

“Well, the almighty wanted them dead. I was just…” he sighed. “Just mucking up her plan, wasn’t I?” 

“I...suppose so.” 

The water was getting higher. One of the toddlers started to cry, and could not be comforted by his older sister, who was looking at the clouds as if the hatred in her expression could part them, could bring the sunlight again. Crowley reached out a hand, then dropped it flat at his side. 

“Can we go, angel? Lots of places to visit. Times to see. See how  _ good  _ the world is now that I’m not in it.” 

“Crowley, I don’t think -” 

“Please, angel?” The tightness in his voice was unmistakable. “Can we please go?” The rain had plastered the hair to his head, and he watched the children with something like utter despair. 

Aziraphale was struck by the sudden urge to comfort, weighed it against what heaven would want, and decided he had deviated so far already that a few more words couldn’t possibly make it any worse. 

“It’s not real, Crowley.” Aziraphale soothed, placed his hand on the demon’s shoulder. “It’s just - it’s shadows. We can feel and touch and… and taste, probably, but it’s all - it’s just a show. They were fine. They  _ are _ fine. Their descendents walk the earth today. You made sure of it.” Crowley finally turned to look at him, and the line of his shoulders was  _ not _ trembling, because he refused to let it. 

“You’re.. You’re sure?” he asked. “This is… just what could have been?” 

“I’m positive.” Aziraphale replied. “Now, what’s say we head out?” Crowley did not need additional convincing, and they flew off towards that dark smudge on the horizon, towards the Ark. 

On the Ark there was an angel. He watched the waves, he watched the children in the distance. The water was quite close to swallowing them. Aziraphale knew what he was thinking, because, after all, it was himself he watched. He imagined another life, one where they had  _ both _ been able to stay, if they had been down here together. What would he have done if he discovered the demon down in the hold with twenty children that should have perished in the flood? 

Not what heaven would have wanted. 

That’s for sure. 

* * *

Next was Golgotha. They took one look at an Aziraphale in a turban watching a man be nailed to a cross, and both agreed that perhaps this one could just be skipped altogether. 

* * *

In Rome, they watched as a Roman Aziraphale sat in a restaurant alone, ate oysters alone, and went home alone. Crowley caught his Aziraphale eyeing the half eaten plate. 

"Go on then," said Crowley, jerking his head towards the table. “We have time, don’t we? For a nibble?” 

"Oh I couldn't," said Aziraphale, who was already sitting down at the abandoned table. "We angels aren't supposed to go in for all this… this  _ gross matter _ ." He picked up an oyster, and, after Crowley managed to stop him just in time from eating the shell as well, made a positively  _ indecent _ noise at the taste as it slipped into his mouth. Crowley found the wooden top of the table VERY interesting in that moment and did not look up again until the angel had finished devouring the rest.” 

"That's lovely!" he exclaimed. "Is all the food like this?" 

"The wine too," said Crowley, snatching a decanter from a nearby table and filling a recently materialized wine glass with it. "Try it." He held out the glass. 

The angel looked at it, thought about things like demons and temptation, remembered how good the oyster had been, and took it. 

If, later, you asked Aziraphale, he would have said that was the moment when things really went a bit off the rails. (Crowley would scoff and say things went off the rails the moment an angel of the Lord appeared to a demon and fucked up his little announcement speech, but that's a private little not-really-an-argument that couples sometimes have, and isn't quite relevant to the story and now that I’m thinking about it I  _ probably _ shouldn’t have mentioned it quite yet. Oh well. We can leave the narrative cohesion to the other holidays.) You see, the moment Aziraphale took the cup from Crowley's hands, their fingers brushed together, and call it destiny or a red string or lightning or fate or grit your teeth and say it's a good old fashioned Christmas miracle (this is a Christmas story, remember), but Aziraphale felt a pull, a shock, a sense of rightness and, well,  _ belonging _ , that he'd never felt above no matter how many hymns he'd cataloged that day. He looked up and  _ knew _ that Crowley felt it too, if the blush spreading over the demon's face was anything to go by and he couldn't explain what was happening, or wasn't ready to, but he  _ did _ know that he'd like to make this Christmas Eve last as long as possible.

And why not? He was an angel, wasn't he? They were in a pocket dimension or some such nonsense that existed outside of time and space, right? 

They could make it last. 

Crowley conjured up another glass for himself, and when they clicked together in a toast, the tone that sounded would have put Handel to shame. 

* * *

There was beer in Alexandria, while Crowley took Aziraphale through the library and the angel marveled over all the knowledge contained in those scrolls, before it burned and burned and burned until there was nothing left because Crowley was not there to stop it (it wasn’t supposed to burn, not to the ground, not to cinders, no matter what those little pop histories tell you). Then sake in Japan in 1005 while a writer’s scrolls were discovered, and the first novel was destroyed, beer and bread outside of Munich in when the prince bishop attacked and destroyed the city, grapes while they watched a performance, a miserably long winded play about some dreadful Danish prince. (“ _ Tragedies _ ,” Crowley had commented, with a pinched look on his face like someone just dumped a bedpan on him. “They never do quite as well as the comedies, do they?”) 

Always, a ghost at their elbow that they could not reach, was an Aziraphale that had never been, who shuffled throughout the centuries, a solitary eternal being, bearing witness to all the horrors, all the pain. With each new era, the lines on his face grew longer, the circles under his eyes deeper. 

By the time Crowley introduced Aziraphale to crepes outside of Paris in 1793, the angel realized that their little romp through history was having rather the opposite effect. 

He had intended for Crowley to buck up under the realization of all the nasty things he’d done, see that he had been a fiend of a demon, and put all thoughts of a holy water dunking behind him. He had  _ not _ meant to see all the, well, rather  _ kind  _ and  _ nice _ things Crowley had done with his time on earth, nor had he meant to see a version of himself slumping throughout history, looking more despondent with each passing century. 

But Crowley had just asked something, and he’d missed the whole thing. 

“What was that, dear?” Crowley dropped the fork he had been holding. He was  _ not _ having little sensations of warmth each time the angel casually slung another endearment his way. It was just - that was how Aziraphale  _ talked _ there was nothing to  _ read into it.  _

“I said so what’s going to happen when this night is over?” He plucked his fork out of the remains of his lunch. “Or week or… indiscriminate amount of unapportioned time. When I’ve come to my senses and… and promised I won’t wash my head in a baptismal font or what have you.” 

“Oh... “ Aziraphale had been trying to avoid all thoughts of “after” in their entirety for some time now. Hours? days? How long had they been traipsing through the ages? It all muddled together. “I suppose… I’ll have to… report back. You know. Job well done, and all that.” 

“Straight back up to heaven then? Going to get a nice  _ promotion? _ ” 

“Well I… I suppose…” 

“Nevermind. Forget I said anything.” 

Aziraphale did not  _ want _ to forget, didn’t want to forget the way Crowley’s voice curled around the ‘t’, or his face, or the way the tips of his ears went red when Aziraphale happened to remark on some of the very undemonly things he did. But - heaven, that was where… that’s where he was  _ meant _ to be, wasn’t it? Cataloguing… (and here he had to force down a sigh) all those hymns. The celestial harmonies. No more wine, no more books, or plays, or grapes. 

_ No more Crowley _ .

* * *

The final two hundred years passed by in a blur. Crowley was doing his best not to look at Aziraphale, at  _ either _ of them, for fear that he’d give himself away with a single glance. Missing, something had always been missing, and now with a few days or weeks or however long it had been worth of travel, after innumerable shared meals and soft looks,  _ he knew what it was _ . But no matter what Crowley wanted, or felt, or was  _ furious  _ with himself for feeling, Aziraphale was leaving. Going right back home, back to a job he despised, to a cloudy white perfect bubble that - that didn’t understand. 

_ And it was all Crowley’s fault in the first place.  _

All of it. If Crowley had never been there, if he’d never fallen, or never been breathed into existence in the first place, if he had  _ never been _ , then it would be Aziraphale kicking back throughout time, enjoying oysters and wine and books.

He did not see the lines in that other face, the clouded expression behind the eyes. When he looked at the Aziraphale of history he saw an angel living a life the way he ought to have lived it, and he grew more and more anxious as their time together drew to a close. 

They touched down back in the churchyard, and the only sign that time had passed at all was the dim light in the east, the herald of Christmas Day. 

“So, that was a thing,” Crowley muttered. 

“Are you - er, that is -” 

“Aren’t you going to say it, angel?” Crowley rounded on Aziraphale, grabbed him by the lapels of his coat. Not roughly, Aziraphale noted. Like he was fragile, like this angel that could tear this demon apart without so much as raising a finger was something to be protected, treated like glass. 

It broke Aziraphale’s heart. 

“Say what?” 

“Tell me. Tell me you - that you hate me, or despise me, or -” Crowley’s glasses could not hope to hide the panicky expression, the rapid rise and fall of his chest. 

“What? Why?” 

“It’s my fault! All of it! You never would have lied to God. You'd be here instead." Ah.

Aziraphale brought his hands to rest gently over Crowley’s, resolutely ignored the hitch in the demon’s throat. 

“Dear, you don’t think - you don’t think I wanted to be in your place, do you?”

“‘Course you did. Didn’t you see yourself out there?”

“I did.” 

“Don’t you -” Aziraphale began rubbing his thumbs in small circles around Crowley’s knuckles, and Crowley couldn’t help the crack in his voice.  _ Don’t you hate me. Don’t you wish I never existed. _

"Of course not,” Aziraphale said, as if he could hear Crowley’s thoughts. “I’m… I am your guardian angel, of a sort. How would it be if I went ‘round hating my own charges.” This drew a sharp laugh from Crowley, would could no longer resist the calling of his human shaped from, and slowly fell forward, into the arms of his angel.  _ An angel of the lord _ ,  _ a Christmas miracle, It’s a Wondeful Life  _ and ten thousand and one other terrible, ridiculous, awful cliches about Christmas and coming home for the holidays clamored in his brain, but… 

But he had been alone for six thousand years, and here, on a Christmas morning, was a warm pair arms curled around him. 

“It seems very lonely," Aziraphale admitted into Crowley’s shoulder. "Though I did enjoy the food and wine in our little romp through the past, it seems… I enjoyed… the company, a bit more." Crowley blinked at him. 

“That’s some pretty romantic stuff for the first date, angel,” Crowley laughed breathlessly, trying to scrape away the last of his dignity. “Might want to tell me you like me better than wine and crepes after at least a month or two.” 

“Oh  _ please _ , we’ve known each other six thousand years.” Crowley chuckled again because  _ they had, they had _ , and then grew quiet.  _ I cannot heave my heart into my mouth _ , isn’t that what the line was, in one of the better tragedies? But what was the alternative? 

"Aziraphale?" Crowley said, with a tightness in his throat that hasn't been there before. He pulled back a bit, just enough to be able to look the angel in the eyes. "I don't think it worked. I uh… I still might do something  _ drastic _ . What… what happens if it doesn't work?" With a trembling hand he pulled the glasses off for the second time. 

Aziraphale looked hurt for a moment, but then the light of understanding dawned, and Crowley got to watch a small, wonderful smile spread across his face. 

"Well, I'd just have to… stay, I suppose." Aziraphale replied. "Until I was absolutely  _ certain  _ you were better. I'm afraid I would have to remain here, on Earth. With  _ you _ ,” he added, in case there was any sort of question. 

"I might not be better for a long, long time." 

"That's alright. We have all the time in the world." 

Crowley extended his hand, and Aziraphale took it. They stood there, in the courtyard of a church, and watched the sun rise up over the Thames as the church bells began their joyus peal. Aziraphale laced their fingers together. As he did so, Crowley felt something slotting into place, a feeling he had been missing for thousands of years. He couldn't explain it, not yet, and if you asked him he would only say that it felt warm, that it felt right, and that he would fight the forces of heaven and hell if they ever tried to take it away from him. 

"Merry Christmas, angel," he said. 

"Merry Christmas, darling." 

**Author's Note:**

> If you're feeling low this holiday season, go watch Good Omens again, or go watch It's a Wonderful Life. There are some stories that fight against the forces of all we think to be true for their happy endings, and those are some of the best stories of all, definitely the ones we need. 
> 
> Happy holidays to one and all
> 
> Talk to me here [@soft-october-night](https://soft-october-night.tumblr.com/)


End file.
